Title: Alone You Breathe

Pairing: Sara/Grissom

Spoilers: Everything so far in season four

Rating: PG, Serious angst, Tissue warning.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Archive: At my site, , Fanfiction.net. Anywhere else, please ask. 

Summary: You were out there drowning, but it never showed…

Author's Notes: For the LiveJournal CSReports "Letting Go" challenge. Title and lyrics come from the Savatage song "Alone You Breathe" which has a line about letting go in it, and once it got stuck in my head, it wouldn't get out.

***

You were never one for waiting.

I knew that from the first moment I saw you, in that lecture hall at Berkeley. There was something electric about you, a charge that surrounded you, marked you out from the crowd. You marked yourself out too, by coming up to me afterwards, asking if we could talk, and when we did, I was entranced by you. That's why I did something I never usually did, took your contact details, kept in touch.

I kept telling myself that we were just friends, that that was all I saw you as, all you saw me as.

I told myself that when you came to Las Vegas on a moment's notice because I told you I needed you.

I told myself that when you stayed.

And I told myself that so many times in the years that followed, even when I knew it to be false. Especially then.

You were never one for waiting, but you waited for me. Waited for me to come to my senses. But I never did that, could never admit my feelings to you. So instead, I pushed you away, even as I longed to pull you closer, assigned you cases away from me, told you that deserved to have a life, tried not to notice your relationship with Hank.

And one night, when we stood in the doorway of my office, the smell of burning surrounding us, you asked me out to dinner. I said no, believing that I was doing it for your own good. You were too young, too bright, too electric for a man like me, a man who'd never been in love, who barely knew how to live.

I knew what you didn't know. That I had to let you go, and hard as it was, that's what I did.

I just never saw the effect that it had on you.

Enough people have told me that I couldn't have known, that nobody knew. I know they're wrong. I could have known, should have known. I should have been there for you.

But there was no-one you could turn to, so you turned to fickle friends like Sam Adams, Johnnie Walker.

They were with you tonight when you were late to work, speeding through the streets of Vegas, slick with rain after one of those famous Vegas storms that appears out of nowhere, vanishes just as quickly. There was no trace of rain on the streets by the time we got there, just your mangled car in the middle of the intersection, David Phillips standing beside it, trying to compose himself, Brass beside him.

I'd never seen Brass cry before.

 "By the time you figure it out, it really could be too late."

Do you remember saying that to me? You were right honey, about so many things.

But now it's too late for that, and Brass is here, telling me I have to let you go.

I just don't know if I can.